Pure as the Lily (13 page)

But it was funny, she hadn’t thought about the disgrace of it, not once. It would be her ma who would think about that, the one person who was to blame for it her da had said, and he was right there.

She dried her face and boarded a tram, and as she was driven through the dead and deserted Sunday town she realized she felt a little better. Now she had seen her da and made her peace with him she would cope; she would cope with anything now, even her ma.

It was nearly a week later when she had to cope with Alice, but she had been forewarned. Just as she had been about to close on the Thursday night Jimmy had slipped into the shop. The . me ma’s coming down to you,” he had gabbled.

“Could be the morrow, anytime, I heard them talkin’. She wants your wages.” She gave him a loud “Huh!” and said, “Can you see me givin’ her them?” and he replied, “She says she’ll knock hell out of you, Mary.”

“Let her try, just let her try.”

He had hung his head as he muttered, “She’s threatened to bray me an’ all if I speak to you.” She had put her hand gently on his shoulder.

“Come the back way anytime. I keep the back door locked, but you knock on it like this.

Rat-ta-tat-tat. Rat-ta-tat-tat. You know? “

“Aye, Mary.* All day on the Friday she waited. With every tinkle of the bell she looked up, expecting to see Alice in the doorway. And when she hadn’t put in an appearance by four o’clock she thought of a way to fortify herself for a late attack. She called Andy Robson from the roadway where he was playing football. He was a lad of twelve, sharp-witted and wily, and would do anything to earn a penny. She took him into the storeroom and said, “ I want you to play outside the window, Andy, and if you should see me ma come in I want you to follow her into the shop, understand? And when I say to you, go and get the polis, Andy, you say all right, Mary, and dash out But don’t go and get him, just go round the block, understand? And if you do that I’ll give you threepence. “

“Oh, I’ll dee that, Mary,” he said.

“I’ll dee that all right.”

By half past seven she was still waiting. She had supplied Andy with bread and jam so that he had no need to go home for any tea, and he was still waiting to earn his threepence.

Her nerves were taut, she was very tired physically. She had been on her feet from early morning either in the shop

or upstairs. She’d had to have the child downstairs with her behind the counter for an hour or so, and he got in her way. She was afraid to ask any of the children in the street to mind him, for Ben had never done this, and if anything should happen to him . well. She wished she was in bed. Oh, how she wished she was in bed and asleep with all her thinking cut off.

It was just on closing time and the shop was empty for the first time that evening when Andy came sidling in and up to the counter and whispered conspiratorially, Tour ma, she’s been standing up near the alley for the last ten minutes or so. And your Jimmy’s just passed the shop and looked in and gone up to her. “

Thanks, Andy,” she said.

“Go on outside and do what I told you.”

She knew why Jimmy had passed the shop, her ma had told him to tell her when it was empty.

She waited, busying herself cleaning the counter with a damp muslin doth. She was covering up the cheese and the bacon when the door opened and Alice entered. She was walking with the aid of a stick and her face looked all white bone, except her eyes which were sunk in her head and full of venom. She hobbled over the step into the shop and went to thrust the door shut behind her, but Andy jerked it open and sidled in. For a moment, she turned her ferocious glare on him, saying, “Get out!” But he didn’t obey her, he merely backed towards the side counter.

Slowly now Alice hobbled towards Mary, and when she came face to face with her, she was standing almost in the same place in which Alee had stood some days earlier. She looked at her daughter and, her lips moving square from her teeth, she said, ‘you dirty bitch you! “ Mary made no comment; but she gripped tightly on the muslin rag and waited.

Alice seemed nonplussed by her silence and now she burst out, The money! I want me money What money

Don’t come that with me, miss. Hand it over afore I take it out of your skin. “

“You’re getting’ no money from me, now, or ever again The words were slow, deep, flat and they seemed to have the effect of stretching Alice’s body upwards. Her face took on colour again, her anger and indignation came out in sweat.

You GIVE ME ME PAY! . “

“It isn’t your pay, Ma, it’s my pay. I’ve worked for it, and I’m not livin’ with you anymore. You’re getting’ nothing from me again ever, not a penny, so get that into your head now.”

“You brazen dirty bitch! You filthy stinking...!”

“Shut up, Ma! Shut up afore I tell you something.”

‘you tell me something? I’ll tell you something! Who’s looked after you all these years? Who’s brought you up? Done without me self to see that you were fed; worked for you for years; slaved down here in this shop. “

‘you slaved, Ma! You slaved, as you call it, in this shop to suit yourself, not for me, nor me da, and not even for Jimmy;

no, I know why you worked here, an’ you know that I know. “ She watched her mother choke, and gulp again, then lift up her stick.

‘you do! “ she cried.

“Just you do, Ma, and you’ll be sorry.”

Alice was trembling visibly from head to foot. She now looked round the shop as if for some support and cried loudly, “Your da’s in prison because of you.”

“Not because of me,” Mary cried back at her.

“It was you who egged him on. Smash him up, you said; smash his shop up, because you were jealous.

That’s your trouble. You wanted Ben for yourself. You threw yourself at him an’ he wouldn’t have you....”

She sprang to the side as the stick came down with a sickening thud on the counter and across the spot where she had been standing.

With lightning speed she lifted the hatch and was in the shop confronting Alice, with only a yard between them.

Her whole body shaking, she cried, “Get out of here this minute! or I’ll send Andy there for the polis.” Andy couldn’t have got out of the shop door at this stage because Alice was standing in his path. Nor did she seem to hear the threat for she screamed back, “You think you’re on to a good thing, don’t you?

You think you’re going to marry him and be set fair for life an’ all this!” She waved her stick widely.

“But by God! I’ll see you don’t; if it’s the last thing I do I’ll put a spoke in your wheel.

You’re under age, you know that, you can’t do it without my consent. I can get you put away in a home. That’s something you didn’t know, isn’t it? I can get you put away in a home. “

“Get out! Get out this minute!”

“Tell me to get out, would you?” She threw her stick aside and her hands came out like talons and clawed at her daughter’s hair.

Mary screamed and struck back, and now Andy didn’t need to be told to run for the polls. But whether he would have gone searching or not he was never able to answer, for there, not ten yards from the shop, was Constable Power on his round, and so he yelled at him, “She’s at Mary!

Her mother’s at Mary. “

The constable followed the boy’s pointing hand and hurried into the shop, and he had to use almost brute force before he could disentangle Alice’s hands from Mary’s hair. Holding the screaming woman by the shoulders, he shook her, shouting, “Be quiet, woman! Be quiet, do you hear me?” When Alice, gasping and spent, stopped her screaming he said to her, ‘now look. Now look you here, missus. Take my advice and get back home. “

“She’s me daughter and ... and she’s not stayin’ here and....”

“Listen to me, missus. I’m giving you a bit of advice, it’s up 101 to you to take it or leave it, but if you don’t go quietly home this minute you might find yourself alongside your husband. Now it’s up to you.” Alice drew in a deep shuddering breath.

The policeman stooped down and picked up her stick, which he handed to her, and like someone drunk she stumbled to the door. But there she turned and, looking back at Mary, where she was standing leaning on the corner, her pinafore hanging from her shoulder where it had been ripped, and her hair tousled into a busby round her face, she cried, “You’ll never know a day’s luck in your life. That’s me prayer, and I’ll say it every night for you. You dirty bitch you!” The policeman did not follow her into the street and through the small crowd, mostly children, that had gathered outside, but he closed the door after her and turned to Mary and asked, “Are you all right, lass?”

She pulled herself up from the support of the counter and moved her head wearily.

“She hurt you?”

She put her hand through her hair. He scalp felt as if it had been torn apart in several places and as she drew her fingers bver it the loose hair came away in her hand. She looked at it, and the policeman said consolingly, Don’t worry, it’ll grow again. But are you all right otherwise? “

“Yes, yes, thank you.” As she looked up at him slow tears welled into her eyes, and he said, “There now, there now. Lock up and get yourself to bed.” Again she nodded at him. He was the same policeman who had locked up her da, he was the one who had come into the shop and found Ben on the floor; he knew all about her, he knew all about everyone on his beat. And nobody liked him; she wondered why.

He said to the boy, “Get what you want and come on.”

Andy looked at Mary. His eyes were wide. He had seen some fights in his time between women in the back lanes but he had never seen anyone look as mad as Mary’s mother.

“Wait a minute.” She went to the till and took out threepence and handed it to him, and he said, “Ta, Mary,” and went with the policeman.

She locked the door; then put the lights out and went slowly upstairs, and just as she was she threw herself on the bed and sobbed her heart out. What was happening to her? What was happening to all of them?

Life had gone mad.

The following morning she put her hair up for the first time. She combed out her plaits, twisted the hair into coils and pinned it up on the back of her head with hairpins from the shop, and immediately she felt different.

She didn’t realize how different until eleven o’clock in the morning when Hughie Amesden came into the shop. He had never been in the shop before, at least whilst she had been serving, and somehow she guessed that he didn’t usually come at all for he lived streets away, near Staple Road.

She had been stooping down, stacking some blue-wrapped pound bags of sugar that she had just weighed, and when she stood up there he was, as tall and as handsome as ever, more so, beautiful. and young.

“A packet of tabs, please,” he said.

She was a second or two before she turned round to the box and picked up a packet of woodbines. As she placed the packet before him he pushed the twopence towards her, and with their hands on the counter they looked at each other.

He stood gazing at her through narrowed lids as if he had never seen her before. He had likely come in, she thought, to see if she had changed, and was finding that she had. Yet the putting up of her hair that morning hadn’t made her into a woman, she had been a woman for days, inside; the putting up of the hair was only the outward sign.

She knew in this moment that she would never feel young again.

“Ta,” he said.

“Ta,” she said.

He turned and walked slowly out of the shop. He was her youth gone.

Had she ever loved him? Had she ever seen him enveloped in a white light? Yes, yes, she had; once a long,

long time ago. Did she still love him? He had spoken to her. She had heard his voice say something, more than that one word “Hello’, and she was surprised that it wasn’t beautiful like him. It was an ordinary voice, like that of any of the lads about the place. She had heard he was no longer at school, and had gone into the mercantile docks to serve his time as a draughts man But did she love him?

It was almost as if she had taken her own hand and impatiently pushed herself back from the counter; for, leaning against the rack, she was confronted by the question, what was she on about. She was thinking like a lass, a girl, and she was no longer either. She was carrying a hairn inside her. In an odd way, she realized that from now on her life would be weighed down with responsibilities.

Her surroundings seemed to fade away, and as if she were looking at a film, she saw the responsibilities stretching down the years: starting with Ben, a disfigured Ben, and his child, and her child; her father, and her Grandma Walton, and her Granda Walton, and their Jimmy; and strangely there was tacked on to the end of her responsibilities the little crippled figure of Annie Tollett.

And then to ask herself that fool question. Did she still love Hughie Amesden?

alec was tried at Durham. It was the end of the day and his was the last of a long line of cases. The court was practically empty but for a few sightseers, mostly unemployed men, and a young woman dressed in a brown coat and a brown felt hat which merged with the colour of her hair.

Mr. Justice Broadside glanced at the prisoner as he listened to the prosecuting counsel. He looked an inoffensive enough creature, slight, thin; yet he had nearly murdered a man, so the prosecutor had just informed him. But it would appear he had had provocation. He looked over the court to the girl sitting in brown. Was she whom it was all about? A pretty piece, and likely more to blame than the man concerned Girls of her age played havoc with older men, and this particular man had nearly paid with his life. He looked around. He wasn’t in court. He motioned the two men below him to the bench, and to his question the Clerk to the Court, said, “From medical report.

Your Worship, he will be badly scarred, facial scars. “

“And that, you sa/—Mr. Justice Broadside now lowered his head and looked over his glasses in the direction of the brown-dad figure ‘is the person in question?” Yes, Your Honour. “

The man in still in hospital? “